The Future of Mobility

By Siddharth Singh, 1st September, 2015

The Economist has a great feature on a future of self-driving cars titled, ‘From Horseless to Driverless’. As the article describes, a future of automated vehicles will be very disruptive. Here are a few key takeaways:

• Utilization: Currently, cars sit idle 96% of the time. It is estimated that self-driving taxes would have utilization rates of more than 75%.
• Total number of cars on roads: A study in Lisbon showed that self-driving taxis could reduce the number of cars needed by 80–90%.
• Insurance: Car insurance in the US is worth $198 billion currently. This will substantially change as insurance cover moves from millions of individual consumers to a handful of automated taxi operators.
• Employment: A study at Columbia University estimated that 9000 taxis could replace all 13,000 taxis in New York.
• Accidents: A study estimated that if 90% of cars on American roads were autonomous, accidents would fall from 5.5 million a year to 1.3 million a year. Deaths would fall from 32,400 to 11,300.
• Delays: If autonomous cars penetrated to 90% of traffic, it would cut delays by 60% on highways and 15% on suburban roads. The resulting productivity gains is estimated to be $1.3 trillion a year in the US and $5.6 trillion worldwide.
• Parking: Parking constitutes 24% of the land area in American cities. People looking for parking account for 30% of the distance driven in urban areas. Automated cars wouldn’t need to park as often and would go on to pick the next ride.

The full article contains other very informative data points and studies, and is worth a read.

Previously, we have also looked at the energy saved and pollution curbed due to automated cars.

While fully automated cars are several years away from being a reality, cars will get increasingly interconnected over time. This Wired article discusses the developments in interconnected car technologies.

Siddharth is on Twitter @siddharth3